Need To Know 2001-09-21

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"We suddenly found that one of our home servers had been turned into a repository for MP3s of the world's worst pop music. All the guy's friends knew about it too, and they downloaded several GB of files in the three days it was up" http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/10/ednote/ednote0110.asp ... have any of you non-Microsoft people ever heard of such a thing? >> HARD NEWS << smoothed, criminal MICHAEL JACKSON's new single seems likely to "Rock Your World" in more ways than one, as promotional copies sent out by Sony appear to be the first examples spotted "in the wild" of audio CDs which won't play in PC CD-ROM drives. "When loaded into the CD drive, the disc spun continuously as though the drive was trying to access the TOC of a blank or corrupted CDR", reports our correspondent, a producer and sound engineer, adding: "None of our stand-alone professional or domestic CD players had a problem with it". Of course, this is exactly what Macrovision's SafeAudio (or similar copy-protection systems) are intended to do: insert "bad" error-correction codes, which audio CD players can interpolate around, but higher-precision CD-ROM drives don't, effectively preventing you from ripping (or listening to) any tracks on your PC. The UK's Campaign for Digital Rights (formerly the "Free Dmitry Sklyarov" guys) are still planning a leafleting campaign alerting shoppers to this ingenious reduction of their music's self-healing properties (making CDs more susceptible to scratches or other damage) - though perhaps an "explicit lyrics"-style labelling system wouldn't go amiss either, for those of us who just don't own a non-CD-ROM CD player. http://uazu.net/cd/ - like anyone with a PC is still buying CDs anyway http://www.bbspot.com/News/2001/08/encrypt.html - apparently not as good as Jacko's earlier, audible work We're all looking for safety in this insecure world: it just happens that some of us aren't looking very hard. Ploughing through the usual inbox of obscure and deliciously open Webservers, we were very hard pushed this week to select the most embarrassing lack of home security. Was it the university clearing service UCAS, who popped onto their public ftp server what appears to be a list of some three hundred thousand students who accepted a place at Uni this year (with their home addresses)? Or was it the folks at FORESIGHT.CO.UK, whose staging server, while ingeniously hidden under the http://stage.foresight.co.uk/ URL, still remains publically accessible - avec private intranet - to the rest of the world. Or maybe, just maybe, it was ACORN USER, whose last CD included a free RISCOS Web Browser - together with the magazine's own selection of personal cookies, including AU reader Brian O'Carroll's Amazon preferences, as well as site ids for voyeurgals.com, amateurpie.com, and perhaps most scandalous of all for the true believers, MSN? ftp://ftp.ucas.ac.uk/pub/accept_home.csv - gone now; don't do it again! http://stage.foresight.co.uk/ - going down any second ... now http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=ant1423570b0r2wt%40194.72.192.6 - or British Telecom. British Telecom would be worse. Answering our own question: no. By tradition, all system weaknesses, no matter how entertaining, are always trumped by use of the infamous ALL@DEMON.NET security hole, whereby company-wide Demon resignation notices always seem to get bounced to our tips address (what are we, Demon's secondary MX?). Good to see the exploit is still open, even as employees are *supposed* to use all@thus.net when firing off their wide-ranging, self-destructive attacks. "all@thus.net mailing list does not go to all staff. Hence the mail to all[@demon.net]", writes the resignee, before settling in for the argy-bargy. It's all here: the homely IRC references, the sideswipes at the non-Net management, the call to the pub, the delicious literary references. We eagerly await the traditional Demon management response, which, judging from last time, consists of a string of abuse aimed at the ex-employee, followed by the swift exit of the manager himself. Demon: however it may change, still the bestest, most fun-packed of ISPs. http://www.ntk.net/2001/09/21/goodbye.txt - "Drink until dead." http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?back=archive99/now0319.txt&line=55#l - zey call it zee "Bliss effect" >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious mysterious Glasgow-based letter-writer to LONDON METRO: http://www.ntk.net/2001/09/21/dohmetro.jpg imitates San Francisco-based SALON columnist of exactly the same name: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/09/14/afghanistan/ ... RICHARD DAWKINS declares war on all religions everywhere, offers personal arsenal of pigeon-guided cruise missiles: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4257777,00.html ... YAHOO search for hijackers' names "inconclusive", reports: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46991-2,00.html - "Some names were close to those of the hijackers, while others didn't match up at all"... striking family resemblance: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk_politics/newsid_1544000/1544871.stm ... SPACE.COM identifies another likely culprit - gravity: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/generalscience/wtc_science_010919.html ... godless "Other Realm" teen threatens further "zappings": http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0671027026.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg ... and, hopefully concluding our coverage for now, good to see everyone mucking in: http://www.webgirlauction.com/ ... lame "last page of net" gag: http://www.1112.net/lastpage.html has two links leaving it... master of camouflage, Privet Ryan: http://freewarepalm.com/hobbies/moviecritic.shtml ... hope CHORUS have registered that popular www.PORTAL NAME.ie domain: http://www.chorus.ie/broadband.html ... very trusting, these small NZ communities: http://www.swktodc.govt.nz/Fix-o-gram.htm ... >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful This year, some of the speculation on how to "save" UK games trade show ECTS has dwelled on whether it should be open to the public and thus become more of a LIVE 2001-style mass- market exercise in soul-destroying corporate PR (from 10am today, Friday 2001-09-21, Birmingham NEC, UKP12.50 on the door). Sapping your will to live this year are opportunities to "have your picture taken with a Sun Page 3 girl", "show off your knowledge of the mobile communications industry" and to "ooh" and "ahh" at the UK's debut unveiling of MICROSOFT WINDOWS XP, which seems to be a long-overdue security patch for the popular virus-propagating operating system. We kid you not, last time we saw a MS product launch at one of these events (admittedly quite a while ago), they were facepainting the kids in the crowd with the "Windows" logo. http://www.livexpo.co.uk/LIVEnews.asp?ID=47 - site requires Flash, for no immediately obvious reason http://ecoplan.org/carfreeday/ - apparently Saturday is also "National Chocolate Day" >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering Hack, hack, hack. X-Windows 4.0's support for antialiasing was a fine, timely hack by Keith Packard; rewriting application widget libraries like Qt and GTK 2.0 to support it are an ongoing piece of hackery in themselves; but in terms of master-kludge, shaolin philosopher Josh Parson's GDKXFT beats them all. It's a stomp-in replacement for the GTK+ font functions that lets almost all Gnome apps instantly fuzz over with antialiased fonts. Some fiddling is required: in particular, you may have to stick in a LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/gdkxft.so before your set-up pays any attention. Also it won't work with Mozilla or gnome-terminal, can crash your X-server, won't work with every font, and when you do get it working, you generally can't tell the difference. Which teaches you an important lesson: Apart from ruining GIFs in the GIMP, why did you want AA in the first place? Oh, yeah: hack value. http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/~josh/gdkxft/ - isn't easier to just take your glasses off? >> MEMEPOOL << hasta la altavista eyes of BUNGLE: http://www.widdy.demon.co.uk/rainbow/head.htm ... old man MOVIES: http://seanbaby.com/ifls/ ... it's lucky we only run unconfirmable RADIO 1 ban lists, isn't it? http://dotmusic.com/news/September2001/news21910.asp versus http://www.snopes2.com/inboxer/hoaxes/radio.htm ... you know when you've been playing first-person shooters too long: http://personal.mco.bellsouth.net/mco/g/r/gregts/ ... and you really know you've been watching too many ads when: http://www.slipups.com/items/15971.html ... hey, what's wrong with the timeless "don't try and ram the station, or vipers'll get you" analogy? http://www.ibell.co.uk/vortex/castle/ ... when retro and case-mods collide (the first, we bet, of many): http://www.globalpublicationspress.com/retrocase/ ... the irony being - it's not funny: http://www.opengiggle.org/ ... it's the little samurai headband its wearing that worries us: http://www.intercorr.com/roach.htm ... in 2001AD, THARG promised all the city blocks would be named after present-day celebs: http://www.jdi.ucl.ac.uk/ ... ugh! bugs! crawling over my - face! http://chat.q42.net/?url=www.ntk.net (IE only) ... kill us both, SPOCK: http://www.thebrainstrust.co.uk/article.17.2002.html ... >> GEEK MEDIA << the less rude www.tvgohome.com TV>> in the future, all celebrities, world leaders and tech standards will be selected via the tried-and-tested process of auditioning idiotic hopefuls on TV, as seen this week in MODEL BEHAVIOUR (6pm, Fri, C4) and BEST INVENTIONS (7.30pm, Wed, BBC1)... the "mobile phone" edition of UNREPORTED WORLD (7.30pm, Fri, C4) so far remains untransmitted due to extended news coverage... LOS DOS BROS (10.40pm, Fri, C4) is a sketch show with the blokes out of "Smack The Pony". Hello?... and the BBC stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the rugged frontier spirit in extended song-adaptation CONVOY (11.15pm, Fri, BBC1) ... Dani Behr - who you may have thought was dead - and Joe Mace - who you may have hoped was - present grimly jovial SM:TV knock-off THE SATURDAY SHOW (9am, Sat, BBC1)... scanners indicate a small but significant risk of Kevin Warwick punditry in AI tie-in THE ANDROID PROPHECY (11.50pm, Sat, C4), handily followed by "Terminator" knock-off APEX (1am, Sat, C4), and preceded by TOP TEN TV LOSERS (9.10pm, Sat, C4)... up against arguably Jim Carrey's most satisfying film, LIAR LIAR (9.15pm, Sat, ITV1), and combined Julianne "Hannibal" Moore, Lori "VR5" Singer and Huey "Back To The Future" Lewis nudity in comparatively watchable Altman portmanteau SHORT CUTS (11.55pm, Sat, BBC2) ... Sherilyn Fenn's NIGHTMARE STREET (11.15pm, Mon, BBC1) begins a week of former "Twin Peaks" contributors failing to live up to their early promise - see also Lara Flynn Boyle in THE TEMP (11.05pm, Tue, BBC1) and David Lynch himself in LOST HIGHWAY (11.55pm, Tue, C5)... the makers of "Robot Wars" adapt their seemingly evergreen teatime format to paintball with X-FIRE (6pm, Tue, C4)... there's a double-bill of computer-graphic enhanced profiles of dead things - the Dodo in EXTINCT (9pm, Tue, C4), and racing driver Ayrton Senna in GOING CRITICAL (9.30pm, Tue, C4)... and, while the BBC pulled an unusually distressing CAPTAIN SCARLET this week (6.20pm, Mon, BBC2), C5 happily showed "Terminator 2", and show no sign of backing down from Spacey/Jackson face-off THE NEGOTIATOR (9pm, Tue, C5)... IN BUSINESS (8.30pm, Thu, Radio4) looks at the UK games biz... Nathan Barley art video "OneDotZero" spinoff ONE DOT TV is back (1.10am, Thu, C4)... and "Evil Dead" director Sam Raimi pops up in uninhibited Jules Verne "adaptation" JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (3.35pm, Fri, C5)... FILM>> it's the epically grim fairy-tale synthetic-emotion lost-child special-effects extravaganza that Spielberg has been trying to make all his life, but unfortunately that doesn't make it any easier to enjoy science-free sci-fi AI (http://www.capalert.com/capreports/artificialintelligence.htm : a nude boy behind an iced glass shield, covering himself with his hands; much talk about sex; sexual conquest; sexual servicing, anatomy and use of robots for sex toys; telepathy; equating sex with love; excessive cleavage before a child; statue nudity, some quite vulgar)... following the hilariously downbeat Startup.com, the other side of the dotcom dream is explored when Wayne "Smoke" Wang and his DV cam imitate http://www.bbspot.com/News/2000/9/linux_laid.html in grainy arthouse nerdporn THE CENTER OF THE WORLD (http://www.cndb.com : porn star Alisha Klass cameos as a stripper; [Molly Parker] has cute small breasts; [Peter Sarsgarrd's] balls at least are clearly visible in one shot when he bends down) - now *that's* AI: http://www.center-of-the-world.com/chat/chat.html ... or Kirsten Dunst comes of age in wrong-side-of-the-tracks teen romance drama CRAZY/BEAUTIFUL (http://www.cndb.com/ : the nudity was cut from the film. It was replaced with a scene with [Dunst] wearing just underwear; a clear view of the underside of her breast at least once)... DRESS DOWN FRIDAY>> sorry, no new designs this month - we're in the process of reworking the shop to accommodate everyone who's asked for everything in girls' sizes, or XXL, or black, or all three. Or shipped to the southern hemisphere, for that matter: "You're right, it's getting a bit chilly here at the tip of Africa - temperature's dropped to the mid-20s", confirmed PAUL W from his .za domain, following NTK 2001-05- 18's jibe: "Isn't it winter over there?". "With the mercury hitting a dizzy 10 degrees at Bristol airport a couple of days ago," Paul adds, "I can appreciate your desire to hold on to all the T-shirts you can". More specifically, if anyone wants to buy any of the current range - "Encoded" now back in stock in both Medium and XL, "Adminspotting" back in more sizes next month - then do so at http://www.geekstyle.co.uk/ before the start of October, when the "changes" will commence... many would-be designers out there seemed to be actively encouraged by the "increasing trends towards the upsetting and bizarre" reported in NTK 2001-07-20, as ANDY PANDINI swept the board for worst pun of the month with his firmly non-sexist "Knead To Know" concept: http://www.pandini.co.uk/ntkfemale.jpg - or, for men: http://www.pandini.co.uk/ntkmale.jpg . Most prolific was TARAS YOUNG, who submitted no less than 6 different designs - http://www.strugglers.net/~taras/images/shirt/ - of which our favourites are probably "treeloot" and "rebelgoat", though we're not sure if the digitised goat is a Jeff Minter trademark, while THE TARTARUS COLLECTIVE explored similar themes with their largely self-explanatory "Keep Mordor Tidy": http://www.tartarus.org/~simon/things/kmt.png ... "Elite" author IAN BELL and MATTHEW GARRETT both went amazingly self- referential with http://www.ibell.co.uk/misc/tshirt/ntk404.htm and http://zeus.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~mjg59/tshirt.html , and CHRIS HEALEY apologised for his "non-existent Paintshop skills", but explained that "anger got the better of me" and went ahead with http://www.arco.ndirect.co.uk/images/tshirt.jpg anyway... of course, if you can't design, you can just send in a slogan - or, if you can't think of a slogan, you can redesign someone else's (we'd still like a more "visual" interpretation of last month's: http://www.tartarus.org/~simon/tshirt.png ). Topping the text-only weirdness this time around was BODO MOELLER's "Personally, I prefer T-shirts with nothing printed on them. Consequently, I recently had myself made a couple of T-shirts saying 'This shirt intentionally left blank'"; the suggestion from JO3SH that we replace all the usual "Jesus [is Lord etc]" bumper stickers with "Linus" instead ("Honk if you love Linus. And so on"); and ALEX TEUGELS who, during the course of discussing whether there was a "Police Aware" complement to Toxico's "Police State" design, came up with the inspirational "Talk to the router, 'coz the host ain't listenin'". As ever, let us know if you could wear (or improve) any of the above, and we *will* get round to printing more in the future, just you see if we don't... >> SMALL PRINT << Need to Know is a useful and interesting UK digest of things that happened last week or might happen next week. You can read it on Friday afternoon or print it out then take it home if you have nothing better to do. It is compiled by NTK from stuff they get sent. Registered at the Post Office as "a breath of fresh air? Isn't that a little tasteless?" http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4260488,00.html NEED TO KNOW THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK. Archive - http://www.ntk.net/ Unsubscribe? Mail ntknow-unsubscribe@lists.ntk.net Subscribe? Mail ntknow-subscribe@lists.ntk.net NTK now is supported by UNFORTU.NET, and by you: http://www.geekstyle.co.uk/ (K) 2001 Special Projects. Copying is fine, but include URL: http://www.ntk.net/ Tips, news and gossip to tips@spesh.com All communication is for publication, unless you beg. Press releases from naive PR people to pr@spesh.com Remember: Your work email may be monitored if sending sensitive material. Sending >500KB attachments is forbidden by the Geneva Convention. Your country may be at risk if you fail to comply.